Sutter East Bay Medical Foundation Neurologist Receives Public Service Award from
KPIX-5 TV

Dr. Joanna Cooper, a
Sutter East Bay Medical Foundation (SEBMF) neurologist has received the Jefferson
Award from KPIX-5 San Francisco for her work co-founding Maya’s
Music Therapy, a music therapy nonprofit that improves the quality of life developmentally
disabled participants.

Maya’s
Music Therapy Fund honors Dr. Cooper’s severely disabled daughter, Maya who died at
age 14 from a rare neurologic disorder.

“She was nonverbal, but she could really
come alive with music,” Dr. Cooper recalled.

When Dr. Cooper and Maya’s father
founded the nonprofit in 1989, they started with a handful of children. Today, the
nonprofit is 29 years old and serves more than a hundred children and adults.

“While the award was given to me as an individual, I
am humbled by the commitment of the many volunteer members of the board of directors
of Maya’s Music Therapy Fund, who over the past nearly 30 years made this continued
work possible,” said Dr. Cooper. “I am also grateful for the unmatched dedication
and talent of our music therapist, Titia Martin-Nagle, who has worked
with our clients from the program’s inception and, of course, to the help from our
many donors and supporters who make the work possible.”

Over the years Dr. Cooper
has expanded the program sessions to several locations in Richmond and Berkeley. There
is a small fee, usually one to five dollars, but no one is turned away because of
inability to pay.